Notre Dame Physics joins the American Physical Society Bridge Program

The Notre Dame Department of Physics is proud to announce that it has joined the American Physical Society Bridge Program. The Bridge Program is an effort to increase the number of physics PhDs awarded to underrepresented minority (URM) students.

Our department is dedicated to diversity, and is recognized by the American Physical Society (APS) as a physics department that supports women, with approximately 30% female graduate students. Joining the Bridge Program is a natural extension of this effort, serving as an explicit commitment to increasing educational opportunities for underrepresented minority physics students. Specifically we offer admission to the Notre Dame physics graduate program to women and underrepresented minorities who show promise in research, but are unintentionally selected against by traditional admissions criteria. The department’s aim is to build our experience as a Member Institution, and then increase our involvement with the Bridge Program by applying to become a Partnership Institution.

As an APS Bridge Program Member Institution we endorse the Joint Statement on Diversity in Physics:

“To ensure a productive future for science and technology in the United States, we must make physics more inclusive. The health of physics requires talent from the broadest demographic pool. Underrepresented groups constitute a largely untapped intellectual resource and a growing segment of the U.S. population.

Therefore, we charge our membership with increasing the numbers of underrepresented minorities in physics in the pipeline and in all professional ranks, with becoming aware of barriers to implementing this change, and with taking an active role in organizational and institutional efforts to bring about such change. We call upon legislators, administrators, and managers at all levels to enact policies and promote budgets that will foster greater diversity in physics. We call upon employers to pursue recruitment, retention, and promotion of underrepresented minority physicists at all ranks and to create a work environment that encourages inclusion. We call upon the physics community as a whole to work collectively to bring greater diversity wherever physicists are educated or employed.”